


Embryonic

by gwinne



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-28
Updated: 2018-03-28
Packaged: 2019-04-14 02:36:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 749
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14126259
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gwinne/pseuds/gwinne
Summary: Some fill-in-the-blanks to work through the very unsatisfying MS4.  In order for Scully to be pregnant, without a trip to the fertility clinic, she would have had to ovulate.  How?This is the beginning of a series that explores Scully's reproductive life.





	Embryonic

Unwanted cells growing at an exponential rate. The first time it happened was brain cancer. Now, at age fifty- four, embryonic and placental tissue—she couldn’t bring herself to call it a baby—in the upper left quadrant of her uterus. She could feel it there, a scratching as it burrowed deeper. She made an appointment at their local planned parenthood, using an old alias. Five minutes later, Monica Reyes was on the phone. William was in trouble.

*  
Eighteen years ago, she would have given anything for that small miracle of egg and sperm uniting in her fallopian tube as she wrapped her body around the solid mass of Mulder in the dark. That first morning when she woke in his bed, new cherry blossoms outside the window, how light and possible it all seemed. Then, the giddiness of their Hollywood celebrity, drinking champagne and talking about zombies. They tried their best to forget her trip with the smoking man. They drank shiner bock on his couch, watched Caddyshack, made their three wishes, and yes, everything was alright. She’d stay there forever, if only The X-Files were a TV show and she could binge on her favorite episodes and skip the rest.

Lately, it had seemed like that again. It wasn’t just that they were back on cases and dating like it was the dawn of a new millennium. There was a familiar quickening between her thighs, her cheeks flush with desire. Estrogen: that’s what it was. Long after her body had stopped producing it on its own. Premature ovarian failure in her early thirties: what happens when your ova are harvested and stored in a government lab. She hated what it represented, but she’d liked not getting her period, not having to worry about carrying tampons when they traveled, urgent stops at convenient stores. So, when she started bleeding again, about five weeks ago, the first time in many years, she made a mental note to check her blood serum levels—E2, P4, FSH—routine business during her IVF days.

  
The truth was she was afraid of what she might learn. Irregular bleeding in menopausal women is a sign of cancer. On a solo grocery run, she picked up some tampons, stashed them in the one bag Mulder never rifled through. She tried not to think about the pulsing sensation in the spot her right ovary would be, a sensation she’d had just once since she’d been returned. She called a friend from her days at Our Lady of Sorrows, asked if she could run some laboratory samples off the record. Then they were on a case. In church, over candles, she whispered that she wanted to find William. She didn’t want a miracle, just the mundane pleasures of domestic life. She wanted to come home and be a family.

*  
She ran the blood sample herself, in the lab at Our Lady of Sorrows. The tech, who owed her a favor, called with the results while she was driving back to the house. CBC was normal. White blood cells normal. Iron levels low. Beta hCG was elevated, consistent with levels in the sixth week of pregnancy. Progesterone also consistent with early pregnancy. They could run another in a few days, to see if it had increased. That small part of her, the old fertility patient part of her, wanted to believe in that miracle sex pregnancy. The part of her that had survived abduction and medical rape, the one that knew she was not only infertile but postmenopausal, a woman whose entire reproductive life had been stolen and engineered, wanted to cut it—whatever it was—out herself. And the scientist—logical, rational—thought not baby but embryonic stem cells. Enough to save the world.

*

It was all there in this single moment as she stared at herself in the bathroom mirror. The memory of abdomen swollen during her abduction. Emily’s funeral. Mulder giving her a vial of her own ova. Asking him to father a child with her. Pushing William into the night with Monica Reyes at her feet and an army of super soldiers as witness. And then handing her baby son, in his sweet bunny cap, so he could be raised by someone else. She couldn’t protect him then; she wonders how they are supposed to protect him now. She couldn’t possibly have another baby. She couldn’t not have another baby. They knew everything. She touched the tender spot at the base of her neck.


End file.
